”Australia’s First 4 Billion Years” delivers the joy of geology.

It’s the geologist’s refrain: rocks tell stories. Geologists don’t (usually) get excited about a chunk of sandstone just because it’s sandy. It’s the secrets it holds—secrets about a world in the past that we can never visit, even as we stand on its consequences.

“Australia’s First 4 Billion Years," a four-part series that begins April 10th on NOVA, recounts the tale of Earth’s history the right way—by letting the rocks tell it. And it does so without even leaving the land down under (save a short stop in New Zealand).

That’s not a limitation, it’s a strength. It allows the program to hone in on details that many won't have heard before, rather than providing a montage of interesting events around the world—an approach that usually yields only the most familiar ones. The program builds an appreciation for the landscape, too, by allowing you to more fully explore the rich history of a region. Besides, Australia’s geology lays bare an impressive amount of geologic time. You could do much worse as far as locations go.

In the first episode, Richard Smith (your guide to all rocks Australian) sets up the series as an adventure in time travel. Using travel down the road as an analogy for moving backward in time, we get some feeling for the vast amounts of time between key events in Earth’s past. Arriving at the formation of the Solar System, the series begins its march forward.

Australia is a great place to talk about the early Earth. It’s home to the oldest things yet discovered (the 4.4 billion-year-old Jack Hills zircons), and stromatolites—the distinctive colonies of archea that appeared 3.5 billion years ago—which can still be seen forming in Shark Bay.

Since the rock record becomes sparse when you get that far back in time, the first program handily covers about 4 billion years. The rest of the series details the last 500 million years, over which organisms have (for the most part) become progressively more familiar.

The second episode looks at the evolution of fish—their invasion of the land and the invertebrates that beat them there, all of which took place on an Australia that bears no resemblance to the one we know. Australia is currently arid and isolated, which makes it even more fun to envision what it looked like when it was once the seafloor. There is also evidence of an ice sheet that covered Australia when it was part of a massive assembly of all the continents.

Following the extinction at the end of the Permian (the Great Dying), the third episode enters the age of everyone’s favorite prehistoric creatures—the dinosaurs. Australia has not been known for its dinosaur fossils, but recent discoveries have provided more than enough treasures to explore. That includes some absolutely gorgeous trackways—one of which may even represent a herd fleeing a stalking predator (though a nice article on the NOVA website explains there is some disagreement about this).

But the dinosaurs couldn’t outrun extinction, of course, which paved the way for the mammal revolution. The final episode focuses on the truly unique fauna that evolved after Australia cut its last ties with Pangaea—from marsupials (kangaroos, of course) to the egg-laying monotremes (echidnas and platypuses). During the glacial periods of the last few million years, megafauna—including huge kangaroos that stood nearly seven feet tall—could have been found in Australia, but may have disappeared at the hands of a vagabond species that showed up some 50,000 years ago. Those humans left their mark on the Australian continent as well, including preserved tracks and remarkable artwork.

The series ends with a little contemplation along those lines—the stories the rocks will tell of humans in the distant future. From mining to agriculture to extinctions to climate change, the human species has more power, in a way, than any species before it. We are altering the planet in a myriad of ways, and as Richard Smith puts it, “The geological extinction record shows we do so at our peril.”

Throughout, the series is well put together. The visuals (both real and computer-generated) are beautiful, and the stories are clearly and engagingly told. There’s plenty to discover, even if the major scenes in the play are familiar to you. And most importantly, it’s fun—the ratio of “wow!” to “how” is pretty laid-back. If you want to kick back and catch up on the last four-and-a-half billion years, this series won’t disappoint.

48 Reader Comments

The Verge also verges (what a punny thread this has become) into other areas, but to be honest, I often find their non-tech stories to be somewhat lacking. But those folks are younger, and they probably all live in Williamsburg and buy lots of "artisanal" foods and such and enjoy dubstep, so there you go. Thankfully Ars is dominated by Chicagoans, so we can avoid most of the hipster-y stuff when they verge outside the tech realm.

I'm a Chicagoan that buys lots of artisanal foods, but whatever, I get your point.

For any Aussie readers, if you're looking for it this was originally titled "Australia: A Time Traveller's Guide" that was aired on ABC in 2012.

OT : but about 25 years ago I took a break from running the Perth Youth Hostels (best job in the world for a single 25 year old man) and hitch hiked with my girlfriend of the time up to Shark Bay. I went swimming one morning hoping to annoy some dolphins but couldn't get them to hang around. I remember being perhaps a km or so out from the shore when I started wondering why it was called "shark" bay? I swam back in shortly after that.

An event like an asteroid impact, of course, would have zero relevancy to species survival from an evolutionary point of view, since extraterrestrial events are outside the scope of the evolutionary paradigm--ie, "nature" would not care (or "know") if the dinosaurs were extinguished by an asteroid since that would have no bearing on their naturally selected abilities to survive on the face of the planet.

The whole comment looks like typical creationist trolling of "preprogrammed life" and zero understanding of biological process. Environmental change is of course not "outside the scope" of evolution but the very contingency it feeds on. Besides variation, which go nowhere without environmental change to select for differential reproduction on.

Any environmental change that changes differential reproduction in a population, either by differences in survival (not likely, given an impactor) or differences in reproduction (say, managing breeding despite little feed because of larger fat deposits), would mean the generation under impact would be selected and the generations after the impact would "care or know" about it through their genes. They would be a little more resilient as a population against impactors (say, by having an increased amount of alleles that results in larger fat deposits).

But also, as many commenters noted, there was a random drift bottleneck (survival not much dependent of the then current alleles), which is _also_ a major evolutionary process, making genetic changes in the population as a response to contingency.